Challenging Gabriel (Knight Security 2) Read online

  How could she have forgotten how dangerous Gabriel was?

  She knew she hadn’t. She had just been so desperate to get Daniel and Lena back, she hadn’t been able to think beyond that.

  “Now you.”

  That emerald glitter remained fixated on her, as with only the briefest of hesitations, she slowly grasped the bottom of her T-shirt and began to pull it upward. There was no point in fighting this—and she wasn’t sure she wanted to—knowing Gabriel wasn’t going to take no for an answer, that he was beyond being reasoned with.

  Had he ever been reasonable? Not that she could remember. From the very start, Gabriel had been forceful and demanding, sweeping her off her feet and into his bed.

  Even so, Angel felt self-conscious as she dropped her T-shirt to the carpet beside his and now stood in front of him wearing only her bra and jeans.

  Gabriel hid the flare of desire in his eyes beneath hooded lids as his gaze swept over her slowly. Angel’s breasts were smaller than they used to be, but just as delicious as they swelled against her bra. Her waist was slimmer, and just above the waistband of her jeans, he could see a silver tracery of lines from where she had carried his baby.

  He glanced up at her. “I thought rich women like you did everything they could to ensure those didn’t happen?”

  “I… Clive didn’t want me to do anything to hide… When I wore a bikini, he liked people to see—” She broke off to bite her bottom lip between her teeth.

  “The bastard liked others to see you had supposedly carried his child.”

  “Yes.”

  Gabriel liked seeing those silvery lines too, to show Angel had carried his baby. If anything, it made her even more desirable in his eyes, not less.

  He stepped forward to reach out and follow the tracery of those silver lines with his fingertips, glancing up as Angel flinched. “You don’t need to hide these from me.” His voice was gruff. “They’re your war wounds.”

  She gave a choked laugh. “Pregnancy isn’t a war.”

  His mouth twisted. “According to my sister, Lily, it is— She and her husband, Jonas, have a six-month-old daughter. Amelia.”

  Angel could hear the deep affection in Gabriel’s voice as he spoke of the other couple and their baby daughter.

  The same way he had once spoken to her.

  Before he left her to disappear on some mission he couldn’t talk to her about and never came back. Gabriel had told her almost from the start what it was he did. Oh, not the details, because he wasn’t allowed to do that, but he’d had to give some sort of explanation for the numerous scars on his body.

  When Gabriel didn’t come back Angel had been worried at first, that he might have received a killing blow or shot. She had been so worried about him, she’d even called the base where he’d been stationed. The person on the other end of the phone had informed her that Gabriel Knight was currently on leave and not expected back for several weeks. Gabriel was home but hadn’t come to see her. After that, Angel had been left with no alternative but to accept Gabriel had never had any intention of coming back to her, that the mission might even have been an excuse to end things between them.

  Gabriel had been ten years older than her, far more experienced, and with an aversion to forming any emotional ties that would hold him back from doing his job. Angel had been left with no choice but to accept whatever had been between them was over, in Gabriel’s eyes at least.

  She had been the one literally left holding the baby.

  Clive Sinclair had kept a casual eye on Angel after her father died of cancer. When he became aware of her condition, he had offered her marriage. Alone and pregnant, her heart aching for Gabriel and what her baby’s future would be without a father, Angel had accepted Clive’s marriage proposal.

  She wasn’t in love with Clive, any more than he was in love with her, but the arrangement had suited them both. Clive had a young wife on his arm and in his bed, and his son and heir in the nursery, and Angel never had to worry about Daniel’s or her own future again.

  Becoming aware of exactly what a monster Clive was had changed all that. Clive might have given her and Daniel a future, but he took that away from other people, seemingly without feeling so much as a twinge of conscience in regard to what he was doing.

  “Don’t ever think about that bastard when you’re with me!”

  Angel blinked as she pulled her thoughts back from the past and into the present. A present where she and Gabriel were both half-naked.

  She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue before lifting her chin in challenge at the savagery of Gabriel’s expression. “Take off the rest of your clothes first.”

  He didn’t hesitate, gaze holding hers as he slipped off his shoes and socks, before unfastening his denims and pushing them down muscular thighs and then off completely. The black boxers he wore beneath fitted him like a second skin, clearly outlining the long thickness of his engorged cock.

  And then he was wearing nothing at all, his eight-inch cock jutting upward and outward from its nest of dark curls, the skin stretched so tightly, the deep red bulbous tip was bare and moist.

  Angel couldn’t take her eyes off him, her sexual tension having grown as she watched him remove each piece of clothing. He was as beautiful as any predator, muscles hard and defined across the width of his shoulders, chest, and abdomen. Waist slender. Hips powerful. Legs long and muscular.

  “Now you.”

  She released a shuddering breath. “This really is a bad idea, Gabriel.”

  “Do you want me to do it for you?”

  His uncompromising tone said he wouldn’t hesitate to rip her clothes from her body, as he had so many times in the past when he couldn’t wait to lay claim to her.

  She continued to look at his face as she unfastened her bra first and slipped it down her arms, allowing her to see how Gabriel’s eyes darkened as he looked at her pert breasts tipped with deep rose-colored nipples. A deeper rose than they had been in the past, another one of the changes caused by her pregnancy.

  Nipples that became engorged under the heat of that hungry gaze and caused an echoing ache between Angel’s thighs.

  “And the rest,” Gabriel bit out.

  She drew in a slow and shaky breath as she unfastened her jeans and slipped them down her hips and thighs, allowing them to pool at her bare feet before stepping out of them. She now wore only a pair of brief black lace panties.

  “Leave them,” Gabriel instructed gruffly as she would have removed those too, stepping forward to go down onto his knees in front of her. He placed his hands on her hips, holding her in place as he pressed his face against her mound before breathing in deeply. “God, your perfume is just the same!” he groaned. “Don’t move. I said don’t fucking move!” he warned as she attempted to do just that. “God, I’ve ached to breathe in this perfume again. To touch the silk of your skin.” His lips trailed a path over each of those silvery lines on her skin. Her war wounds. The marks she bore for carrying and giving birth to his son.

  “Gabriel—”

  “No more talking.” He pulled aside that small lace barrier and parted silky, trimmed dark curls, gazing hungrily at the swollen lips to her channel and the pulsing clit above before slowly lowering his head and running his tongue along the seam of her sex all the way up to the exposed nubbin above. He groaned as he felt her clit pulse and swell against the rasp of his tongue.

  “Gabriel…” Angel’s hands moved to grasp his shoulders for balance, fingers digging into his flesh.

  “I am going to make you come so hard and so many times, you won’t know where one climax ends and the next begins,” he promised harshly before his tongue flicked remorselessly against her clit at the same time he thrust a finger inside the tight heat of her channel.

  Angel cried out as she came instantly, clit throbbing as her channel contracted tightly and her juices flowed over his still-thrusting finger.

  Gabriel hooked his fingers into that scrap of lace and ripped i
t from her body, baring her completely, then added another thrusting finger, pumping into her as his tongue continued its assault on her clit. Over and over again until she cried out a second time, and then a third, her juices flowing copiously over his fingers before he lapped them up greedily.

  Pure, addictive, fucking nectar.

  “Part your legs more,” he ordered harshly. “Do it, Angel,” he growled when she hesitated too long.

  She parted her legs without further protest, allowing Gabriel the access he wanted. He continued lashing her pulsing clit with his tongue and pulled his fingers from her channel, spreading her juices all along the seam of her sex before doing the same to the rosette of her bottom.

  “Don’t fucking fight me,” he warned when she jerked away at this intimacy. “Every inch of you belongs to me,” he reminded her harshly. He eased a finger inside that tight ring of muscle. “Who do you belong to, Angel?” He worked his finger into her slowly but surely. “Answer me, damn you!”

  “No one. I belong to— You,” she groaned as he began to thrust inside her. “I belong to you!”

  “Too damned right you do.” His thumb pressed and then flicked against her clit in the same rhythm as his finger thrust inside her, stretching her. “Don’t ever forget that again,” he warned before he plunged his tongue deep inside her still-contracting channel and continued to work her remorselessly until she came. “Again,” he ground out forcefully.

  Angel climaxed again and again on Gabriel’s command as he explored and reclaimed every inch of her, knowing he was punishing her as much as making love to her. That this sexual onslaught was the outlet for the anger he felt toward her. For denying him Daniel all these years.

  She took it all, part of her reveling in the punishment when it stopped her from thinking or feeling anything else. Until she couldn’t take any more, her legs no longer supporting her as she collapsed forward over Gabriel’s shoulder.

  “I’m not finished with you yet,” he warned as he rose to his feet with her draped over his shoulder. He walked down the hallway to what turned out to be his dimly lit bedroom. Her first indication that so much time had passed, it had grown dark outside.

  Angel was barely aware of the cream, tan, and gold décor of the bedroom, as she was placed on the tan silk coverlet of the king-size bed. Gabriel opened the bedside drawer and took out protection before rolling it on the fullness of his cock. His much larger body completely enveloped hers as he leaned on his elbows and looked down at her.

  His large hands cupped either side of her face. “Tell me again who you belong to?”

  Angel knew her hair must be tousled, eyes wild, cheeks flushed, lips puffy. “You.” How could she deny what was, after all, the truth? He was all she had ever wanted. All she had ever needed. And he was here, with her, about to claim her completely again.

  “Say it again as I enter you,” he ordered harshly as the bulbous top of his cock nudged against her entrance. He stilled completely at her silence. “Say it! And keep saying it until I tell you to stop.”

  Their lovemaking had always been wild, but Angel had never seen Gabriel quite this wild before, so fiercely demanding and so totally remorseless and lacking in warmth.

  She looked up at him in appeal. “You’re out of control, Gabriel.”

  “You don’t think I could stop this whenever I want to? If you do, then you have no concept of what I could do if I really lost control.” His laugh was hard, bitter. “No fucking idea what I’m capable of.”

  After these past few hours, Angel was beginning to understand, to realize why he had made such a formidable weapon for the British army all those years. Gabriel had just never revealed this side of himself to her before.

  Because right now, she was the enemy. The woman who had denied him his child for the past seven years. The woman he must surely hate more than he desired. But Gabriel was incapable of physically harming a woman, and so he had made Angel’s punishment this remorseless demand for her surrender. Over and over again.

  Angel was barely aware of the tears as they began to fall down her cheeks. “I did what I thought was best at the time.” She renewed her plea for understanding. “It was never meant to hurt you.”

  Gabriel felt as if he were emerging from a dream. Or, more aptly, a nightmare. Angel had come back into his life, but only because her son, their son, had been taken from her and she didn’t know how to get him back. Gabriel would never have seen her again if that wasn’t the case. Would never have even known he had a son.

  He rolled off her and to the side of the bed before standing, his back toward her. He looked over his shoulders, eyes narrowed as he heard her gasp. “What?”

  “I… Your back…?”

  He had forgotten about that six-inch scar down the left side of his back. A scar Angel had never seen because it hadn’t been there eight years ago. “Go back to your own bedroom,” he bit out evenly.

  “But—”

  “I said go!” he repeated coldly as she remained unmoving on the bed.

  Naked and unmoving.

  Gabriel’s control would carry him only so far, and right now it was stretched to the breaking point. He didn’t want to continue making love to Angel in this mood, had no idea what he would do to her if he did. What further cruelty he might inflict on her.

  She gave another sob as she moved lithely to her feet, her footsteps light as she ran across the bedroom to open and then close the bedroom door behind her.

  Which was when the tension left Gabriel’s body and he sank down onto the side of the bed to bury his face in the palms of his hands.

  Chapter 4

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Angel froze in the dimmed light of the hallway, fingers gripped tightly about the handle of her suitcase as she slowly turned to face Gabriel.

  He stood in the open doorway of the sitting room, naked down to the waist, faded denims resting low on his hips, a glass of amber liquid in his hand. Not the first or even the second since they had parted the previous evening, if the weariness about his eyes and mouth was any indication.

  “I’ve been waiting for you to try to leave. Care to join me?” He held up the glass. “While I tell you all the reasons that isn’t a good idea.”

  Angel left her suitcase out in the hallway as she followed him tentatively into the sitting room. There was a half-empty bottle of whisky on the coffee table in front of the sofa, to show Gabriel had been sitting there. It gave him a clear view out into the hallway as he waited for her to leave.

  She had waited until almost three o’clock in the morning to make her move, the silence in the apartment lulling her into the false belief Gabriel was asleep in his own bedroom.

  She had heard the ringing of the telephone several times a couple of hours ago, followed by the sound of Gabriel in the kitchen, and then silence. She had assumed—wrongly—that Gabriel had gone to bed. What was the saying? Assumption is the mother of all fuckups? Something like that anyway.

  Gabriel collected a second glass from the side dresser before pouring an inch of whisky into it and offering it to her. “Drink it,” he advised. “You’re going to need it.”

  She took the whisky glass in both her trembling hands, sitting down in an armchair before taking a sip, conscious of the fact she hadn’t had anything to eat since the lunch they had shared the previous day. The whisky warmed her throat on the way down before roiling as her stomach protested at the arrival of the strong liquor.

  She rested her head back against the chair. “Has something happened?”

  “Depends what you mean by happened.” Gabriel shrugged as he sank onto the sofa to sit watching Angel through narrowed lids as he lifted and placed his bare feet on the rim of the coffee table. He felt exhausted. So exhausted he couldn’t even raise the energy to remonstrate with Angel as to how stupid she was to think he was going to just let her walk out of here. “Jonas called. They’ve located Sinclair at his villa in Majorca.”

  Her expression brighten
ed. “But that’s good, isn’t it?” Her eyes widened in alarm. “Unless Daniel isn’t with him?”

  Gabriel had never doubted Angel’s intelligence, only her taste in men. God knows he was no prize, but Sinclair was way out of his league when it came to bastards. Jonas might have discovered Sinclair’s whereabouts, but Ethan had made an in-depth check into Sinclair and his business dealings. Not through the usual polite—and sanitized—channels, but through the contacts they had in the Russian and Italian underworlds. Gabriel knew so much more about Sinclair now than he had a few hours ago. Most of which he wished he didn’t.

  “As far as we know, Daniel is with him.”

  “As far as you know…?”

  He shrugged. “No one has seen him— That doesn’t mean he isn’t there, Angel.” He dropped his feet to the carpeted floor as her face paled, sitting forward. “The security around the perimeter of the villa is tight, much more so than usual, so we’re assuming Sinclair and Daniel are there.”

  She stood abruptly. “But you don’t know for certain?”

  “No.”

  “I know the villa well. We’ve spent whole summers there. The security is… I can help by telling you what I know about it.”

  “You can, yes.”

  “We have to find out if Daniel is there!”

  “And we will.”

  “When? I can’t just sit around here—”

  “Sit down, Angel.” He kept his voice low and authoritative, waiting until she had done so before continuing. “What you need right now is to be made aware Sinclair is into some seriously twisted shit.” He scowled.

  “I told you that—”

  “It’s worse, Angel, so much worse than you even thought it was. Which is why it seriously isn’t safe for you to leave here and be on your own.”

  Even her lips had gone pale now. “Why not?”

  Gabriel sighed heavily. “Because the longer you hold out against him, the more chance there is of Sinclair losing patience and actually hurting you. He’s a sadist, Angel. He enjoys watching other people’s pain, physical as well as emotional.”